Book Description

This selection of seventeen papers by Professor Anthony Cutler falls into three broad groups, all including topics with which the author has been concerned for many years. Chapters III-VIII are concerned primarily with Byzantine subjects, and with their historiography. The last of this group also probes Italian relations with Byzantium which, in one manner or another, is also the theme of the next four papers. Chapters XIII-XVI are devoted to Scandinavia without, however, abandoning the focus on interconnections between ‘works of art’ and the societies that they represented.

Over the course of thirty years, the author has reverted frequently to the broad theme of the relation between artefacts and the cultures from which they emerged, prompted to respond to the art historian’s characteristic lack of concern with the reasons for (as against the ‘sources’ of) the objects that he or she studies. These papers are linked by Professor “Cutler’s general impatience with an attitude set out long ago by Henry Adams: ‘We can admire a cathedral without comprehending the force of the Cross that produced it’.

Contents

Introduction

Stalking the Beast: Art History as Asymptotic Exercise

Originality as a Cultural Phenomenon

Under the Sign of the Deesis. On the Question of Representativeness in Medieval Art

In the Margins of Byzantium? Some Icons in Michael Psellos

The Christian Wall Paintings in the Parthenon: Interpreting a Lost Monument

Sacred and Profane: The Locus of the Political in Middle Byzantine Art

The Pathos of Distance: Byzantium in the Gaze of Renaissance Europe and Modern Scholarship